It’s been almost a year since we announced support for Virtual Machines under Azure Resource Manager (learn more about the advancements and the additional capabilities of the new stack). We also provided guidance around how to best connect and have resources from the two deployment models co-exist in your subscription using Virtual Network Site-Site Gateways. In addition, we released the capability to configure your ExpressRoute circuit to connect to both your classic and resource manager virtual networks.

We are now pleased to announce the public preview of a migration service that allows you to migrate IaaS resources from Classic to Resource Manager. We encourage you to try this migration out on your development and test environments in your Azure subscription!

What is our goal with migration?

We are really excited about the power and capability offered by the new experience and APIs available on the resource manager model for Virtual Machines. We think this is really going to change the way you can use the cloud in a lot of ways.

With the release of the new model, you can deploy, manage and monitor related services in a resource group. Resource Manager enables deploying complex applications using templates, configures virtual machines using VM extensions, and incorporates access management and tagging. It also includes scalable, parallel deployment for virtual machines into availability sets. In addition, the new model provides lifecycle management of Compute, Network and Storage independently. And there’s a focus of enabling security by default with the enforcement of virtual machines in a Virtual Network.

From a feature standpoint, almost all the features are supported for compute, network and storage under Azure Resource Manager with a few exceptions while we've added the ability to create scalable deployments using Virtual Machine Scale Sets. In addition, we are continuously improving the user experience and adding more features to the azure portal to bridge the experiences.

Because of this new capability and growing deployment base in the Resource Manager model, we want to enable customers to be able to migrate existing deployments in Classic.

Migration of IaaS resources from Classic to Resource Manager Stack

The following articles take you through a step-by-step workflows of how to plan the migration and go through the entire process of moving your deployments into the resource manager model.

PowerShell community scripts to clone Virtual Machines

In addition to offering the platform service in public preview, we’re also releasing community-based PowerShell scripts that allow you to clone the virtual machines from the Classic to Resource Manager Stack. We are also accepting community contributions on the script repository.

Next steps

We will continually add more features and capabilities to the migration service in an effort to simplify your experience. In the meantime, hope to receive your feedback on the migration experience. Alternatively, you can also comment in our technical articles.